Stories by Brennon Slattery

Google's long-awaited cloud-based music player, Music Beta by Google, will launch today at the company's Google I/O conference, according to Billboard. The service will be free for US users lucky enough to get an invite from Google, with priority given to those with the Verizon version of the Motorola Xoom tablet and to attendees of the I/O conference. Unfortunately, Google didn't come to a license agreement with the major music publishers -- much like Amazon failed to get publishers' blessings with the launch of the Amazon Cloud Drive -- so Music Beta is essentially just a massive remote hard drive.

Apple has long prided itself on the environmental consciousness behind its products, and consistently aims to get greener. But according to Greenpeace's report measuring the amount and type of energy consumed by top tech companies' data centers, Apple is doing a poor job with its energy consumption.

Google Map Maker was released almost three years ago, allowing users in 183 countries to modify the online maps we've become reliant upon. Now Google has extended the reach of Map Maker to include the United States and added new features such as street-level perspective on places with Street View imagery, editable points of interest, and powerful search options that can see small details like railroad tracks.

Almost five years after the Nintendo Wii launched, broke sales records, and revolutionized gaming with the introduction of motion-sensitive controllers, the console is slated to get a successor by E3 in June 2011.

Bing, Microsoft's little search engine that could, has taken 30 per cent of the U.S. search market share, posing a serious threat to Google's dominance in the field.

It might be time to say good-bye to the days of Android as an open-source platform. After sealing Honeycomb from developers in an effort to combat subpar Google-branded products from entering the market, Google is now quietly implementing "non-fragmentation clauses" into its Android license arrangements, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Google joins an growing number of companies offering group chat capabilities via text messaging on smartphones with the release of Disco Messenger.

Though Google has several good reasons to play keep-away with Android 3.0, the move to restrict developers from Honeycomb's source code is seen by some as a contradiction of its open source philosophy.

At 4:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey wrote "just setting up my twttr."

Friday is iPad 2 launch day and that could mean bedlam for consumers eager to get their hands on Apple's new and improved tablet. At 4:00 AM EST, the iPad 2 became available for purchase online, but it carries an average shipping wait time of two to three weeks. It'll also be available at over 10,000 different retail locations starting at 5:00 PM EST.

When it comes to browser security, Internet Explorer usually gets ridiculed and beaten up the most. And though Microsoft's IE8 was quickly unraveled at Pwn2Own, Apple's Safari 5 was hugely embarrassed by getting hacked in five seconds flat.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, adopted a puppy named Beast and have given him a Facebook fan page.

In traditional media, having your TV show go from No. 1 to being shut down indefinitely is bad news, especially when paired with allegedly drug-induced public rants. But on the Web, it spells winning (or, more aptly, #winning) and it's that wave of Internet success that actor Charlie Sheen rides today.

Students with a tendency towards truancy in California's Anaheim Union High School District are being assigned GPS units to make sure they're going to school on time, according to The Orange County Register.

Facebook, the online representation of modern society, is a-changin' with the times by adding two new options to its list of relationship statuses: "in a civil union" and "in a domestic partnership."